Books of July 2023

Reading

Here is my updated infographic for the books I've read in 2023 - July Edition.

Stats in July - (Year to Date)

Reading Stats

Books Read - 10 (52)

Pages Read - 3963 (21298)

Books Read

Dawn by Yoshiki Tanaka	Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty
Under Fortunate Stars by Charles Todd	Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
A Pale Horse by Charles Todd	The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley	The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri
The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells	Magic Slays by Ilona Andrews

 July 2023 Covers

Authors - 3 (31)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - (1)	Alexander McCall Smith - (2)
Angeline Boulley - (1)	Hiromu Arakawa - (2)
Ann Leckie - (2)	Brandon Sanderson - (1)
Carlene O'Connor - (1)	Charles Todd - 2 (6)
Connie Willis - (2)	Dan Moren - (2)
Daniel O'Malley - 2 (2)	Ed Yong - (1)
Elizabeth Bear - (1)	Elle Cosimano - (1)
Fatima Ali - (1)	Ilona Andrews - 1 (4)
Isaac Asimov - (1)	Jim Butcher - (1)
Louise Penny - (1)	Martha Wells - 1 (1)
Mur Lafferty - 1 (1)	N. K. Jemisin - (1)
Patrica Briggs - (4)	Rick Riorden - (1)
Robin McKinley - (1)	Stephen King - (1)
Tasha Suri - 1 (2)	Timothy Zhan - (1)
Tomohito Oda - (14)	Waubgeshig Rice - 1 (1)
Yoshiki Tanaka - 1 (3)

2023 Author Cloud - July Update

Publishing

Publication Range

Earliest Book - 1982 (1953)

Most Recent Book - 2022 (2022)

Publications by Decades

2020s - 3 (30)	2010s - 5 (16)
2000s - 1 (10)	1990s - (4)
1980s - 1 (1)	1950s - (1)

Books

Source

Borrowed From Public Library - 6 (38)	Borrowed From Friends - (2)
My Audible Library - 2 (3)	My libro.fm Library - 1 (2)
My "Kindle" Library - (5)	My Kobo Library - 1 (13)

Formats

Audio Book - 5 (30)	eBook - 5 (15)
eBook (Comic) - (16)	Hardcover - (1)

Ten and Three Years Blogging

Well, it’s August again and I get to wish you Happy Blog End and Start Day.

If this is your first Blog End and Start Day, welcome! This is the day when I “wrap up” my blog and then also the day when I start a “new” blog for a new year. This is the tradition because I always find it hard when long running projects fade away and so I don’t want to take on anything that doesn’t have a committed end date. So every August I start a new season (or edition, or volume) of the blog.

This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I tend to actually make changes to how I’m blogging in January, but I publish my first real post on … July 24, 2011… wait why do I write publish these these on August 1? Aaanyway, this is my yearly update to the Blog as Blog (writing about things, as opposed to project updates).

The biggest thing that’s different this year from last year is that the actual number of posts is way down. I’ve gone from averaging 5ish posts a month to more like 3. Most of that is changing how I keep track of the books I’ve been reading, and going from a list to a monthly infographic. This has generally made me happier because it cuts down on trying to keep track of the books and having a constant need to post and honestly making the monthly infographics has been fun. In light of all of the AI nonsense going on right now, doing things by hand feels worthwhile and entertaining and satisfying.

I’ve also been trying to put less stuff on the blog so that I can focus more on projects, be that [writing] or other stuff. I also want to write more better blog posts, I really want 2023 to be the year I set myself as a writer in my mind, and writing more meaningful posts is a part of that, so I’m trying to put less filler on the blog.

Since April I’ve given myself the objective of writing two meaningful blog posts each month. One is supposed to go on here, and the other is supposed to go on my professional blog Learning and Technology. I should be at eight posts so far, and I’m at five, but I feel like I’m moving in the correct direction. (It is the nature of blogging that all posts are made while moving in the correct direction because when you’re falling around not doing things, one of the things you don’t do is blog.)

I think I’m happy content wise with what’s up and I feel like I’m doing things I like doing in a way I like doing them.

What I’m increasingly less happy with is the platform. I’ve been on Blogger for a while and got very close to quitting a few years back when they suddenly modernised a bunch of stuff and it got easier to use. As a platform blogger is okay, but it isn’t exactly doing what I want. The biggest (and maybe dumbest) thing right now is that it still limits you to 200 characters of tags per post. That’s fewer characters than I generally need and it breaks the way I want to be using tags.

The other thing is it’s past time that I consolidated my digital footprint outside of Google’s infrastructure. Especially with issues coming up around AI, the time feels right to move on, but also just in general if I want to advocate for doing things the right way online I should probably do things the way I think they should be done.

So I’m going to start looking at moving the blog over to my own infrastructure. I’ll post lots of updates as I get things set up, but you may have to move your RSS feed when the change comes. A while back feedburner had a fit, so I took it off the blog, but then it started working again, so if you follow on RSS and have for a while, migration should happen automatically, but it may not. It’s 2023 never trust a corporation, or software, or anyone, or anything. Maybe move to the woods and help restrore the environment...

Cough. I’m not 100% sure what tech stack I’m going to go to, but figuring that out will give me more things to blog about, so it’s a win all around. At the moment, I might lean into wordpress, but I also think, given a lot of what I want out of the web, I may go towards Hugo and try to keep things as flat and dumb as possible.

Anyway, that’s your update for another Year of the Blog. Take care and I’ll see you in August 2024 (plus hopefully lots of days in between).

Project 23 - Update - Actually Writing the Station Mystery

I’m trying to get better about getting things done and finishing projects. Of course, I’ve decided to try finishing an 80,000 - 100,000 word novel. I hear that this may not be the easiest way to get practice in.

Still I’ve been working on writing a “shitty first draft"¹ of my Station Mystery novel for the last few weeks. When I wrote about the book back in January I mentioned not being too sure how to go forward since I’m usually trying to do so many things at once. I’ve decided to focus on the Station Mystery as my primary project and try to prioritise working on it. So for these last few weeks I’ve set a goal of writing for half an hour a day, which I do after the things I have to get done, but before the things I should probably do. I’m not really consistent yet, but I’m moving in the right direction.

Half-an-hour is not a lot of time. I’m only able to write about 500 words if I write the whole time. On the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m actually doing it and 500 words a day is so much better than 0. So for now I’m going to say that it’s a good start.

When writing, I’ve instituted a general rule that once I finish a paragraph, I’m not allowed to go back and edit it and this is really helping me to get stuff on the page. I am allowing myself to leave comments in the margin as I go so I can either fix a thing, or just note something or just point out just how shitty the draft is. This gives me just enough of a push that I can let what I’m writing go without getting hung up on it being good or even making that much sense.

Since I first wrote about the Station Mystery at the beginning of January I did two starts on the first chapter and gave up, but my new rule is helping get things on the page. I’ve also rewritten the outline, with less text but more sticky notes in Miro. Those two outlines have helped me work out what needs to be said and what I’m supposed to be doing in each scene. Since it *is* a murder mystery, it’s also helpful for figuring out how the mystery fits together.

I’ve also started using Obsidian to build a world book for the story. I’ve been using it increasingly to keep track of things at work and it’s a really helpful way to track things like relationships. I’m trying not to world build too much and it helps to be able to make decisions on the fly.

At this rate I hope I’ll be finished with the first draft by the end of the year and by then I’ll have a whole extra year’s practice of writing and be ready for what ever happens next.

¹Lamott, A. (1980). Bird by bird. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group

Video Games of June 2023

June was a relatively chill month. I mostly put in an hour or two on Tears of the Kingdom and also tried to get other stuff done. I felt pretty happy with the month. 

I've stopped recording mobile games. I've also mostly stopped playing them, but I picked up the full blown successor to "Seedship", "Beyond the Chiron Gate". It's a text-based game, where you make decisions about building a crew to investigate a wormhole network with the nifty little caveat that you can never go back to a system after you've found it. I've enjoyed it quite a bit, although the fact that some of the descriptions are repeated frequently enough that it makes it a little hard to get really invested in the lives of any of your little team flying through space. Certainly worth the price to play.

My top five games (by play time) for June were:

1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - ToTK has been really good. As I said in May, it a lot denser and more vibrant than Breath of the Wild. The ways they've expanded the core concepts in BoTW are really fun and there's usually at least "lne more thing" that I want to do every time I play. The story telling is also quite well done and they balanced the story with the messing around really well this time.
   
   


2. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - I played the first few missions and had some fun with Advance Wars, but then ground to a halt when I hit a level I couldn't solve. If you've been reading for a while, you'll know that as much as I *like* tactics games, I'm often not very good at them, and games in the Advance Wars style really seem to stymie me. I find I'm often slow to solve puzzles in a lot of cases, and tactics games that don't give me an unreasonable breadth of actions tend to be a struggle. I may go back, I think they did some good work in the rerelease, but the core game play hasn't been my jam.
   
   


3. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Vroom vroom, as always. Lately I've been looking for something that's easy to play but kind of interesting for those quick moments when I don't want to risk getting sucked into Tears of the Kingdom. Maybe time to look into reviving my gaming PC.
   
   


4. Donkey Kong Country (NSO - SNES) - Been watching Dan and Dan play through Donkey Kong Country 2 on PlayFrame. I figured I'd see how it felt to play again and how far I could get. SNES platformers from this era also kinda match for that easy to get into game I'm looking for. It's also intersting to look at how games from that era weren't good at really communicating with players how to do well (or even to play) which I think is a mix of a lot of business decissions (don't want those kids renting these games) and technical ones (we already have all the sprites we can have on screen). As a kid, DKC was really impressive, looking back on it from today it seems really limited.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for June:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month: